


Boundaries

by MlleMusketeer



Category: Transformers: Prime, Transformers: Shattered Glass
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Horror, Multiple Optimuses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 22:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MlleMusketeer/pseuds/MlleMusketeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Optimus isn't one to believe in spirits. Somehow, that only makes things like this more disturbing. A short Halloween-inspired fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boundaries

There was only one time that Optimus Prime would freely admit to being utterly unsettled. It was on Earth. He was patrolling, alone, as he had been wont to do after the restoration of the Matrix, when he’d seen a second pair of headlights on asphalt off to his side. He’d done the initial scan, and kept a wary watch on it, but did not concern himself overmuch even as it got closer.

What did make him stop in sudden alarm was the realization that there _should be no road_ next to him. There had never been a road, not on any map, not for all of human record, and yet the other truck—it was a truck, he could see it now—cast beams of light onto yellow dashed lines and black tarmac. 

It continued some distance past him, then stopped, reversed, and in the meager light of the stars and his headlights he saw it looked much like him, but darker, purple. 

A clash of transformation and it rose to look at him with evaluating red optics and he too transformed to meet it, saw a flare of surprise. It cocked its head, withdrew its battlemask as it studied him and in shock he looked at a frame the mirror of his own, save that it was purple where it should have been red, and there were scars across the faceplate. 

But in every other particular, it was him. 

They stared at each other a long, long time, and then the other bot cocked its head and smiled, a smile that made Optimus’s spinal strut prickle with unease. There was no feel of an EM field; though he could see the other perfectly clearly, hear the shift of joints and plating, there was no real sense of its presence. 

It reached for Optimus with clawed digits, but did not touch him, ran up against some invisible force in the air and looked at its hand in puzzlement, then at him. 

“One day,” the apparition said, clear and unmistakable. Optimus’s voice. 

And then it transformed and left, and scarcely a hundred feet down the road it vanished though it was a clear night.

Optimus did not see it again.


End file.
